Evaluating Mentorship Opportunities
A four-step framework
Here is a four-step framework for evaluating mentorship opportunities:
- Find companies with smart people
- That are willing to spend time with you
- Find companies that invest in mentorship
- And give you ownership on challenging problems
Mentors can be helpful for providing advice, encouragement, and connections. They have experience and knowledge that can help employees set and achieve goals. Mentors have an outside perspective that can help employees understand themselves and the organizations they work in. Your network of mentors can also be leveraged for future opportunities.
When evaluating companies, it can be difficult to understand whether they will provide outstanding mentorship opportunities. Let’s explore how to evaluate mentorship opportunities using the framework above.
Smart
First, look for companies with smart people you can learn from. Ideally, these are people who have accomplished goals that you would like to accomplish in their past work experience. When interviewing, ask questions to understand where people have worked, what specifically they worked on and achieved, and what they learned from those opportunities. Think critically about opportunities that do not explicitly tell you who you will be working with- you may luck out and land on a great team, or you may end up in an unfulfilling role. If you are considering starting your own venture, consider your network and potential team, as well as whether mentorship is an important criteria for your decision.
Time
Second, evaluate whether there will be access to senior team members who want to spend time with you. At larger companies, leadership may be too far removed; at very small companies, they may not have attracted an experienced leadership team. Look for evidence that those leaders and senior team members actually care about mentorship. Many of them will say it is important, but dig deeper for examples.
Investment
Third, seek companies that are willing to invest in mentorship. This may come across in onboarding documentation, where you can understand how the company thinks about goal setting and resources available to employees. Internship programs are often evidence of willingness to invest in mentors; large companies will typically have these, but successful internship programs are rarer at startups. There may also be formal or informal programs where employees can meet each other and share about their work (e.g. tech talks, brown bag lunches, coffee chats, pair programming). Ideally, you can see employees who have grown with that company- those employees are usually willing to share their experiences.
Ownership
Lastly, identify companies that enable employees to personally work on challenging problems. While mentorship can be a catalyst for personal growth, ownership on difficult projects is a key ingredient. Be careful of places that provide interns with small “pet” projects. Seek companies where you will work on meaningful parts of the business.
Mentorship at Abnormal Security
At Abnormal, we have a history of hiring and growing young employees. We have an 100% conversion rate of interns accepting full-time offers, and over eight engineers are former interns of Kevin Wang, our VP of Engineering.
“Abnormal loves to invest in talent. Mentors have been helpful in my own career, and I want to pay it forward. I find great satisfaction in helping teammates reach their full potential,” says Kevin.
Employees have access to our experienced leadership team for formal and informal mentorship. Our team has experience at companies including Twitter, Proofpoint, Amazon, Netskope, and Pinterest. We have very few layers of hierarchy, and so each employee has exposure to everyone in the organization.
“Mentorship happens when you have the autonomy to make important decisions, near people who can guide you through the best way of approaching them. Seen in this light, there are not many places with the density of opportunity, ownership, and experienced mentors as Abnormal,” states Fang Deng, engineer at Abnormal.
We take pride in working together as a team to solve problems. We also host weekly tech talks and brown bag lunches to share what we are working on and lessons we have learned.
“Abnormal has a strong culture of community. I frequently reach out to people at the organization for advice and always get help,” notes Umut Gultepe, engineer on the Account Takeover team at Abnormal.
If a culture of mentorship and access to a strong leadership team and peer community interests you, check out our careers page.
